Showing all posts about books
The rise and rise of Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
19 April 2023
Cold Enough for Snow (Giramondo Publishing), by Melbourne based Australian author Jessica Au, is a heart-warming story of a young woman and her mother, who holiday in Japan together.
A young woman has arranged a holiday with her mother in Japan. They travel by train, visit galleries and churches chosen for their art and architecture, eat together in small cafes and restaurants and walk along the canals at night, on guard against the autumn rain and the prospect of snow. All the while, they talk, or seem to talk: about the weather, horoscopes, clothes and objects; about the mother’s family in Hong Kong, and the daughter’s own formative experiences. But uncertainties abound. How much is spoken between them, how much is thought but unspoken?
But Au’s debut novel has had run of success that authors — both new and established — could only dream of. Since being published in February 2022, Cold Enough for Snow has won a slew of awards. Gongs so far include the 2020 Novel Prize, of which it was the inaugural recipient, and the 2022 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction.
Au’s book also cleaned up at the 2023 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, collecting both the Fiction award, and the Victorian Prize for Literature, valued together at A$125,000. The novel has also been shortlisted in the fiction categories of the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards, and the 2023 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Cold Enough for Snow was also shortlisted for the fiction award in the 2022 Age Book of the Year.
Literary award longlist listings meanwhile include the 2022 Indie Book Awards, 2023 Dublin Literary Award, and the 2023 BookPeople Nielsen award. These are incredible achievements, and are all the more remarkable given the page count barely exceeds one hundred. Compelling stories do not need to be of epic proportions.
But Cold Enough for Snow’s winning streak may not be over just yet. Today, the title was included in the shortlist of the Small Publishers’ Adult Book of the Year category in the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs). The winners of the ABIAs will be announced in late May. We can only be left wondering: what’s next for Au’s debut work of fiction?
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Australian literature, books, Jessica Au, literary awards
2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) shortlists
19 April 2023
Another day, another literary award shortlist announcement, this time it’s the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIAs) shortlists. All up, seventy-one books have been shortlisted across fourteen categories, including Audiobook of the Year, Biography Book of the Year, several Children’s and The Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, with five titles selected in two fiction categories:
Literary Fiction Book of the Year
- All That’s Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien
- The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
- Horse by Geraldine Brooks
- Seeing Other People by Diana Reid
- Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
General Fiction Book of the Year
- Dirt Town by Hayley Scrivenor
- The Tilt by Chris Hammer
- Exiles by Jane Harper
- Day’s End by Garry Disher
- Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson
The ABIAs are pretty close to Australia’s equivalent of the Oscars (or Logies), but for books rather than movies. Accordingly, winners will be named at a ceremony on the evening of Thursday 25 May 2023, in Sydney.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards
Sales of paper books surge in the United Kingdom in 2022
18 April 2023
Paper, or physical, books are by no means relics of a bygone era, if sales thereof in the UK last year are anything to go by. Six hundred and sixty nine million books were purchased in 2022. Against a population of sixty seven million people, that equates to about ten books per person.
A Year in Publishing, a look at the state of the book market by trade body the Publishers Association, found that sales were up 4% from 2021 in 2022, 669m physical books were sold in the UK, the highest overall level ever recorded.
UK book exports also increased by eight percent, with Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman, topping the list of books sent out of the country. To date, there are now five books in the Heartstopper series — which has spawned a Netflix TV show — with a sixth, and final, title on the way.
Meanwhile in Australia, nearly seventy one millions books were purchased in 2022, an increase of about eight percent on 2021, according to Nielsen BookData figures. I’m not sure what quantity of books sold were physical, but it seems bookshops had a good year, so I’m guessing a lot were paper.
It’s to be hoped bookshops in Australia (and elsewhere, of course) are doing well again, after a difficult few years. While it’s purely anecdotal, I saw that Dymocks, a large Australian bookseller, is opening a brand new store in the Sydney suburb of Bondi Junction in June. Saying re-opening a bookshop is probably more accurate, as the company did have a shop there, which closed several years ago. While opening one bookshop does not a trend make, the move can only be a good sign.
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The Age Book of the Year awards 2023 shortlists
14 April 2023
The Age Book of the Year awards 2023 shortlists were announced this afternoon. The awards are split into two sections, one for fiction, and the other for non-fiction.
The shortlisted titles for the fiction award are:
- Limberlost by Robbie Arnott
- Every Version of You by Grace Chan
- A Country of Eternal Light by Paul Dalgarno
- Funny Ethnics by Shirley Le
- The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
- Faithless by Alice Nelson
The shortlisted titles for the non-fiction award are:
- The All of It by Cadance Bell
- Childhood by Shannon Burns
- Suburban Noir by Peter Doyle
- Raised by Wolves by Jess Ho
- Wandering with Intent by Kim Mahood
- Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters by Mandy Sayer
The winners of each category — who will be announced on Thursday 4 May 2023, at the opening of the Melbourne Writers Festival — will receive a prize of ten thousand dollars.
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Australian literature, books, literary awards
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo tops 2023 Dymocks Top 101 book poll
11 April 2023
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by American author Taylor Jenkins Reid, has taken out the number one spot in the 2023 Dymocks Top 101 book poll.
Another title I’ve also read, The Dictionary of Lost Words, by South Australian based writer Pip Williams, was voted into the number two slot.
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books, literature, novels, Pip Williams, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Book Depository to close for orders on 26 April 2023
8 April 2023
Online bookseller Book Depository says it will shut up shop in late April 2023. Established in the United Kingdom in 2004 by Stuart Felton, and Andrew Crawford — a former Amazon employee — the company went on to be bought by Amazon in 2011.
The news comes as a blow to book buyers across the world:
Thousands of Book Depository customers, including bestselling authors, reacted with sadness over the announcement. “Sad to hear the news. A huge loss for all of us,” New Zealand-based author and poet Lang Leav tweeted. “My heart breaks,” another Twitter user said.
Not everyone is upset by the announcement however, according to Dan Slevin of New Zealand bookshop association Booksellers NZ. He says local sellers struggled to compete with Book Depository, who didn’t levy GST — a consumption tax — on sales, as they were not based in New Zealand, and also offered free delivery on purchases.
Dan Slevin, chief executive of Booksellers NZ, said there were “metaphorical champagne corks popping in bookshops all over New Zealand”.
I detected similar sentiments in Australia being expressed on Twitter. Book buyers are unhappy, but local booksellers not so much. Possibly some delivery services in Australia may also be rejoicing, if some of the tweets I saw are anything to go by.
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BookTok, the best friend of authors and booksellers
25 March 2023
Constance Grady, writing for Vox, on the impact BookTok — the book lovers’ community within video-sharing platform TikTok — has had on book sales in recent years. In terms of the American book market at least, BookTok is almost unrivalled when it comes to selling books. That could come down to the (unrivalled) sincerity of BookTokers, when they talk about their favourite novels:
The main reason BookTok sells so many books, according to most of the BookTokers I talked to, is because it feels authentic and personal. TikTok’s native format of short, punchy videos and culture of casual chattiness combine to create an atmosphere of intense intimacy between content creators and their audience. In the book world, that kind of intimacy and emotional connection is rare. All the caps-locked blog posts in the world can’t match the visceral force of a camera on a real person’s tearstained face as they sob over their favorite books — books that could easily become your favorites, too, if you want to buy them.
Grady also explores the matter of remuneration. Some BookTokers are making a living from their channels, but many are wary about accepting payments from book publishers. Others of course do, but usually declare which of their posts are sponsored, and which are not.
I’m not sure it’s territory I’d like to venture into. As regular readers know, I frequently feature new and recently published books, that are usually Australian. But they are outlines, and seldom reviews, and are written at my own volition, and not at the request of anyone else.
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books, publishing, social media
Paper books give Gen Z much needed screen free time
19 March 2023
Generation Z, being people born between 1997 and 2015, prefer to read paper books rather than electronic ones, according to World Economic Forum data. A break from eye-straining smartphone screens, a desire to support local bricks and mortar book stores, and the smell of newly published paper books, are among reasons they cite for the preference.
Book sales in the US and the UK have boomed in the past two years, the management consultancy McKinsey found. Sales in the US hit a record of more than 843 million units in 2021, while last year had the second-highest number sales, at almost 789 million. This increasing popularity was partly because of Gen Z and its social-media trends, including the hashtag #BookTok on TikTok, McKinsey said.
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Fear of litigation stops publication of some Australian books
18 March 2023
Fear of litigation is prompting some Australian publishers to reject manuscripts for titles they think may be contentious, particularly books about controversial public figures.
Melbourne based writer and editor Hilary McPhee, says poorer quality books are the result, if public interest stories end up being suppressed:
“We have fewer and fewer publishers and we have poorer and poorer books as a result. There’s a lot of cautiousness and nervousness. And the larger the company, the more nervous they are.” Larger companies were publishing fewer but more lucrative authors. A few smaller companies such as Upswell were taking risks, “but the big ones don’t seem to me to be brave. It’s terribly bad for authors.”
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Forget skim reading, novels are best read slowly
16 March 2023
London based writer and reviewer Susie Mesure, writing for The Guardian:
Elizabeth Strout, the Booker-shortlisted author of Olive Kitteridge and the Lucy Barton books, is also taking books at a more tranquil pace. “I was never a fast reader [but] I think I read more slowly than I used to. This is partly to savour every word. The way a sentence sounds to my ear is so important to me in the whole reading experience, and I always want to get it all – like when you read poetry.”
On one hand, I am an impatient reader, on the other though… it can take a while to read a title.
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